The present invention relates to a computer aided planning system for planning various jobs, and more particularly to a planning support system suitable for the development of a planning system dealing with various scheduling issues, and to a scheduling system using the planning support system.
A planning system which can rapidly respond to daily changes has been desired in order to solve the problems associated with making a plurality type of products with small volume and reducing intermediate inventories in a manufacturing factory. The main issue of planning, such as production scheduling, job assignment and the like, concerns optimizing a combination of various conditions. It is difficult however to develop a general planning system because the planning target changes frequently.
An example of a computer aided general purpose planning support system is described in "PRECOMPILER FOR PROCESS LOGIC DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE IN INTELLIGENT PLANNING SUPPORT SYSTEM" by Kazuhiro Kawashima, et al., the Papers of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol. 28, No. 9, pp. 975 to 986, in September, 1987, and in the Proceedings of COMPSAC 87 with the same title at pp. 649 to 655 issued by IEEE, in 1987.
In this paper, planning software for dealing with planning issues is developed and maintained by dividing the planning logic into a process logic and a solving logic so that a large amount of data can be processed, and planning software can be changed in real time in response to daily changes.
A planning issue having a dispersed solution, such as an issue of optimizing a combination, has no general method of solving it such as conventional general linear programming. It is therefore necessary to develop a program (herainafter called "planning program" for solving an individual planning issue, posing a problem of a difficulty in constructing a planning system speedily.